Understanding Amazon Analytics to Open the Retailer Black Box

The e-commerce landscape has created a dependency of brands on retailer sites to generate sales. As a result, brands have a blindspot when it comes to their online performance, which we call the “retailer black box” and the biggest black box of all is Amazon. Understanding amazon analytics is vital for brands to understand their performance and retailers to compete with Amazon.

How does Amazon compare to the other top retailers? Among the top 50 retail brands, Amazon accounts for 44% of retail traffic and 76% of online transactions.

One of the reasons Amazon is getting so many transactions is because more and more Americans are becoming Prime members. Some estimates put the share of US households that are prime members at over 50%. And that number grows every month by about 200,000.

Unveiling Amazon Analytics from Prime Day 2018

Prime Day 2018 was Amazon’s biggest day ever in terms of transactions, surpassing Cyber Monday and Black Friday 2017. In fact, if you look at the combined sales on July 16 and 17th, it was larger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined with total transactions about 9% higher. Visits were actually a bit lower for the two days combined, but were within less than 1% of the Black Friday + Cyber Monday visit numbers.

Top Selling Products from Prime Day 2018

Which products were people actually buying on Prime Day? Unsurprisingly Amazon’s own devices dominated the day with the biggest discounts of the day.

If you exclude Amazon’s own branded products from the list, electronics items still dominate. These top products could be an indication of what to expect for Cyber Week 2018. The only non-electronic on the list is the LifeStraw, an on-the-go water filter that could be a hot holiday gift for the outdoorsy. The Instant Pot continues its reign as a hot product even after months at the top of the Amazon charts. Note that the top 10 purchased products on Amazon during Prime Day had wildly variable conversion rates.

Amazon Analytics by Retail Category

Amazon’s house brands are among the top sellers in most categories, but notably absent from Toys which will likely see growth this upcoming Holiday season with the absence of Toys R Us.

In the Clothing, Shoes & Accessories category, Hanes and Fruit of the Loom have dominance over Amazon Essentials. While these top selling brands represent basics and undergarments, the internal search data reveals that there’s a strong demand for shoes and other fashion items. The top five branded searches were all for shoes, perhaps footwear is the next “step” towards the growing ecommerce apparel category. This also tells us that people are looking for apparel that they may not be finding just yet, but there’s definitely demand for things like dresses and women’s tops and swimwear.

In the end, competitive data – from product to category, onsite search to purchase — can drive your ecommerce strategy and improve sales through Amazon. —- This post was excerpted from our free Amazon Analytics Webinar which is available on-demand.